The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay (9 page)

Meanwhile, across town, Paolo had asked Luca if they could have a talk.

They were in Paolo’s office, a room unchanged in fifty years but which looked far older even than that, because their father, a lover of all things British and antique, had instructed its fitting-out in a Victorian style. It was wood-paneled, decorated with rare maps, and smelled of beeswax and dust and slightly of damp. An eighteenth-century window looked out over a narrow street to other eighteenth-century windows.

Luca had brought coffee, and put both cups down on the big desk, a partner’s desk inlaid with emerald-green hide. He sat on its corner and looked attentive. “Go on.”

“Nina isn’t talking to you,” Paolo began. “Why isn’t she talking to you?”

“Why isn’t she living with you? Same reason, I suspect.”

“Which is?”

“It’s a mystery.”

“I didn’t recognize her, Luca. When she started talking about it, her unhappiness. It came out of nowhere. I was caught off guard.”

“I told you. She’s seemed different to me, too.”

“Why was she so weird about your staying with us? She’s always wanted you around. But then suddenly she couldn’t
tolerate you being in the apartment. She said she couldn’t eat any more bread that you’d made us. It was actually bizarre.”

Luca came over to where Paolo was sitting, in their father’s old chair, and put his hand on his brother’s shoulder, but was aware of Paolo’s struggling to keep composure, and withdrew. He sat down again on the edge of the desk and folded his arms and looked at the floor as if it interested him. “Have you spoken to her?”

“Yesterday. I rang to see if she needed help with the move. She seemed offended.”

“Well, I can sort of see her point. I can hear Francesca saying that help with moving in sounded like help with moving out.”

“Is she still talking?”

“No. And I don’t see her as much now. The last time, she was on the sofa when I came in after work. Doing the sudoku in the
Times
, the pen in her mouth and her face all frowny. Her little hands. There and then gone. She was perfect, you know. Not just beautiful, though that counts for a lot. She was so tolerant of all my terrible shit.”

“Indeed.” Paolo looked thoughtful. “Here’s the thing that floored me. When I pressed her for reasons, she told me I was like her father, too much like him.”

“You are, you’re very like him. It’s why she married you.”

“She’d got it into her head that I was secretly miserable and masking it in being a workaholic, and that I was ripe for an affair and she couldn’t bear it to happen and was leaving before it could. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell.”

“You really have honed that nutshell.”

“Why didn’t she turn to you, in this crisis? She’s always turned to you. Let’s be frank for once.”

“What do you mean, ‘frank’? And what do you mean by ‘for once’?” Luca stood up and put his hands on the hips of his chalk-stripe jeans.

Paolo looked down at Luca’s polished brown Chelsea boots, and up at his white shirt, silk jacket, gray and tan striped scarf. He thought,
It isn’t any wonder that people think he’s gay
. He glanced down at his usual dark-blue suit, the blue striped tie, and was aware of their dullness. A lack of imagination seemed to have become an issue. The two men were both beginning to show signs of their age; both had developed crow’s feet around their eyes, though neither had much gray to speak of, and their body shapes were just as ever — Luca slim and lithe and Paolo broad and strong. Luca was taller than average, and Paolo four inches taller than him. It had occurred to Paolo on several occasions over the years that if it came to it, he could take his brother easily and snap his neck.

“Paolo?” Paolo had gone vague. Paolo was staring at Luca’s shoes.

“She said she needed to be loved more, more than she loved me. What did she mean? I don’t get it.”

“You and Nina have never really grasped this nettle.”

“What’s the nettle?”

Luca didn’t say,
Drifting, the drifting
. Instead he said, “She came to a decision, when Fran died. I don’t know why. It was just time, after a long time. That’s the best I can do for a summing-up.”

“Do you think there’s somebody else?”

“How could there be?”

“It’s unimaginable.”

“I’m sure there isn’t. And look. While we’re discussing things, there’s something I need to talk to you about. About the future. About mine.”

At the airport, standing looking for her paperwork, Nina had been astonished to realize that Paolo was in the crowd, his familiar shape, his familiar face, intent on finding her. He’d said, “I had to come,” and they’d moved further aside so as to be out of people’s way. Paolo looked sad. “I talked to my brother again,” he said. “I know there’s something. He’s being evasive and he’s never evasive.”

She’d blurted it. “We slept together. Luca. Me.”

She said it looking into his eyes, because cowardice had always been an issue.

Paolo was at first stunned and then unsurprised. He dropped the carrier bag he was holding (he’d bought magazines to give her for the flight) and having retrieved it adjusted his stance, moving his feet wider apart as if he was unsteady. He stared at her and there was a long exchange of eye contact, the seconds ticking by. Shock had already given way to an unbearable contempt.

“When?”

“I’m sorry.”

“When?”

She wished that she hadn’t used the euphemism. Slept. They hadn’t slept. She should have used a far more brutal and appropriate word.

“Nina? When was this?”

She’d told the lie about the timing of it. There hadn’t seemed to be any choice. It didn’t feel like a choice. “It was after I moved out, and it wasn’t really anything. It was once.”

“I knew it, I knew it.”

“It was the wrong turn. I’m fine now and it’s all over, the whole illusion; I promise you. I promise you.” Why was she pleading?

Paolo didn’t seem to have heard. “I knew it,” he said again.

“You didn’t. Even I didn’t.” She’d never felt less coherent.

“You’re in love with him; have always been.” He said it more to himself than to Nina.

“It was more like … it was like an addiction.” She saw Paolo wincing; she was wincing herself.

“That’s just a synonym, though, isn’t it, Nina.”

“But it’s over now. Finished, all of it. I promise you.”

They were standing in the zone where people queued to have their boarding cards scanned. People around them pretended they couldn’t see them, the couple who were standing aside; they pretended they couldn’t hear the conversation. But they smiled at each other as they talked, these strangers, speaking to one another in a way designed to mask their listening in. Such drama, going on in this cramped institutional space, couldn’t help but verge on the absurd.

Nina said, “I need to go through.”

Paolo said, “I wish you hadn’t told me.” She gathered her things together and he watched her. He said it again. “I wish you hadn’t told me.”

“I’m sorry.” She began to walk away.

“How are we going to do this, now?” he said, loud enough for everyone to stare, for people to begin to stifle laughter. “I didn’t think this was really over. But it’s over, isn’t it?”

As she went through security, her face was hot with shame.

CHAPTER SIX

Triangles are stable things, mathematically stable but sometimes misleadingly so. We could do away with the triangle and place Nina and Luca and Paolo at points in a circle, each of them holding the hands of the other two, though the idea of a triangle, with its corners, its pauses and reversals, is better suited to the three of them. Perhaps it was always complicated, though very little of this embedded complexity showed up in the photographs that Anna took, hundreds of them, of Nina and the boys who lived next door. Anna took it for granted that Nina would marry one of the Romano boys. At night, stroking Nina’s hair until she slept, Anna told stories framed like an old folktale.
There were once two brothers, tall, dark, and handsome brothers who loved each other with absolute love, and who as boys met a girl called Nina, as fair as they were dark, whose pale hair and pale-blue eyes marked her as a fairy creature
. “Which of the brothers will win the fairy girl?” she’d ask. The outcomes weren’t always the same, but the versions in which she married the handsomer, more confident brother usually ended less than well.

Because she had no children of her own, Nina carried pictures of her own childhood with her. Herself and Luca and Paolo as children: these were her children. In the photo that sat at the front of the picture slot in her wallet, a print in Kodacolor taken on a
big, flat beach, she and Luca were eight and Paolo a taller, robust-looking ten-year-old, his eyes watchful and his smile guarded. He was physically distinct from the other two, with a soft belly, large thighs, the beginnings of a double chin, dimensions that didn’t much change in later life, other than to be firmed up by the hours he spent at a city swimming pool. Even as a child his expression was unlike those of the others; there was something about Paolo even at ten that was wearily human. Anna said he was an old soul. Luca and Nina, on the other hand, looked like immortals, like sprites. They had similar bodies, then, similar long, bony limbs, prominent knees and elbows, angular faces and wide smiles, eyes that shared and escalated mischief. The beach photograph at the front of the slot was the picture Nina showed Dr. Christos, one that illustrated the circle. The one she didn’t show him illustrated the triangle. It was hidden at the back of the compartment, one of her and Luca at fifteen and Paolo at seventeen, photographed in the garden. Nina was in the middle and had looped a skinny arm around each boy’s neck. Her white-blonde hair was in two thin plaits that wound around the crown of her head like some Nordic girl goddess.

That was the day it started: the triangle’s official beginning. By then everything was in flux. Paolo was standing right next to Nina but looked as if he was already pulling away from her, even as the picture was being taken. This separateness had begun in the summer holidays: Paolo had been unavailable, having found other things to do and other people to do them with. Now, at the start of the October half-term, his not wanting to spend time with Nina and Luca was obvious. He’d begun to tire of the pranks and silliness of his brother, and Nina’s enthusiastic, uncritical aiding and abetting. He’d curl his lip a certain way, when Luca was being lunatic and Nina his devoted accomplice, and look into the
middle distance, wishing himself elsewhere. That afternoon had been a case in point. After they’d had their picture taken, having been summoned into the garden and put into the old pose, Luca and Nina went to the Findlays’ sofa and listened to
The Dark Side of the Moon
, an album of Nina’s mother’s, one that her father had deemed barbaric; the barbarians, he said, were long past the gate and were trampling through the rose beds. Paolo had declined an invitation to join in. Instead he’d followed Anna into the kitchen, glad of a chance to talk about his dilemma (whether to go to university or not), but then she’d had to go out and so he’d wandered into the sitting room, still holding his coffee cup and with the stance of a spectator. Luca was lying with his head on Nina’s corduroy-clad thigh — it was a proper autumn day and they were all in cords and sweaters in mud and heather colors — playing a game of their own devising that was called Alternatives. One person declared a theme and then, after the others narrowed it down, had to come up with a funny alternative to the lyric they were listening to. Paolo wasn’t keen on playing; he wasn’t as quick-witted as the others and his brother could be scornful.

It was Nina’s go. “Jobs. Professions.”

“Weavers,” Luca said straightaway.

Nina began to laugh. She was laughing even before she could spit it out. “Dark side of the loom!”

She and Luca both found this hysterically funny. Paolo didn’t. It was a small thing, the kind of thing that could create alliances and also destroy them. Luca, laughing and bouncing the back of his skull uncomfortably on Nina’s leg, had been tipped off it and rolled forward. She’d tried to save him and the two of them had gone over the edge of the couch and onto a lambswool rug. Their limbs had become entangled. They took their time disentangling them.